Mumps – an illness typically associated with little kids – is roaring through UC Berkeley, with seven confirmed cases and 13 more suspected. By contrast, the city of Berkeley has seen just six cases since 1990. "This is obviously big in comparison," said Mary Kay Clunies-Ross, a spokeswoman for the city.

There is an outbreak of mumps in the UC Berkeley campus community, campus officials announced late Tuesday night. Cases of the contagious viral infection, which is transmitted by the mucus or saliva of an infected person, were first reported on campus Friday. The confirmed cases were quarantined, but Tuesday Associate Vice Chancellor for Business and Administrative Services Ron Coley sent a campuswide email announcing the outbreak.

School officials are asking parents at a Poway elementary school to be on alert after a child there was diagnosed with mumps. The 9-year-old attended Highland Ranch Elementary for four days while infected.

More young children are getting immunized in the United States for preventable diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella and hepatitis A, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Thursday.

In a new report investigating adverse events caused by vaccines, a panel of experts says there are relatively few health problems caused by the most commonly recommended immunizations, which public health experts advise that all children receive. The conclusions, issued by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in its latest report, "Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality," represent the most comprehensive review of the available literature on the potential side effects of eight vaccines – for mumps, measles and rubella (MMR); chickenpox; influenza; hepatitis A; hepatitis B; human papillomavirus (HPV); diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTaP); and meningococcus.

The number of two-year-olds getting the MMR jab, the triple measles, mumps and rubella vaccination, is at its highest level since 1998, after years of worrying measles and mumps outbreaks among teenagers and young adults. More than nine in 10 infants under 24 months across the UK have had their first jab against the highly infectious viral diseases for the first time since the now discredited doctor Andrew Wakefield suggested a link between the jab and autism. The controversy so undermined public confidence that vaccination rates fell to dangerously low levels – with then prime minister Tony Blair being quizzed repeatedly in 2001 as to whether his son Leo had had the jab.

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